Compressive simultaneous full-waveform simulation

The fact that the numerical complexity of wavefield simulation is proportional to the size of the discretized model and acquisition geometry, and not to the complexity of the simulated wavefield, is the main impediment within seismic imaging. By turning simulation into a compressive sensing problem—where simulated data is recovered from a relatively small number of independent simultaneous sources—we remove this impediment by showing that compressively sampling a simulation is equivalent to compressively sampling the sources, followed by solving a reduced system. As in compressive sensing, this allows for a reduction in sampling rate and hence in simulation costs. We demonstrate this principle for the time-harmonic Helmholtz solver. The solution is computed by inverting the reduced system, followed by a recovery of the full wavefield with a sparsity promoting program. Depending on the wavefield’s sparsity, this approach can lead to significant cost reductions, in particular when combined with the implicit preconditioned Helmholtz solver, which is known to converge even for decreasing mesh sizes and increasing angular frequencies. These properties make our scheme a viable alternative to explicit time-domain finite-differences. Seismic Laboratory for Imaging and Modeling, Department of Earth and Ocean Sciences, University of British Columbia, 6339 Stores Road, Vancouver, V6T 1Z4, BC, Canada